coming up on r t in egypt hundreds of protesters have died during a massive crackdown by government security forces with the death toll likely to rise the future of the nation now looks even more chaotic the latest updates ahead . u.s. drone strikes in yemen have seen a drastic uptick now it's reported that one of these strikes killed a top al qaeda bomb maker will look at the u.s. drone war in the country coming up. and it's thursday so it's time for our tech report and the digital age u.s. companies face a growing number of hack attacks and it seems that those very companies are thinking about fighting that war on that and tonight show.

it's thursday august fifteenth eight pm in washington d.c. i'm meghan lopez and you are watching r t well let's begin our coverage tonight in egypt the death toll from clashes between protesters the supporters and the military has soared this week as the situation in the country spirals out of control. at least six hundred thirty eight people are reported dead as a result of this unrest according to the egyptian official health ministry another three thousand seven hundred seventeen people have been injured but don't get attached to those numbers they are likely to rise as a violence continues to plague egypt the situation has become so unstable that president obama took time today to address some of his own concerns united states strongly condemn it. the steps that have been taken by egypt's interim government

and security forces we deplore violence against civilians we support universal rights essential to human dignity including the right to peaceful protest but while we want to sustain our relationship with egypt our traditional cooperation cannot continue as usual when civilians are being killed in the streets and rights are being rolled back as a result this morning we notified the egyptian government that we are canceling our biannual joint military exercise which was scheduled for next month. he made no mention however of the one point five billion dollars in annual aid that the u.s. sends to egypt where now despite the military's attempts to raise to have the problem or see a protest camps demonstrators continue to gather in the city squares across cairo artie's belcher who is in egypt with the latest the latest reports we just had the supporters of ousted leader mohamed morsi have attacked a governor building here in the capital just in giza which is on the outskirts of

cairo they are obviously extremely angry following yesterday's bloody onslaught which some hundreds die in security forces he promised to do a peaceful dispersal all of the supporters have moved in one city and basically opened fire for several hours causing a huge death toll there are also expected to be marches later this afternoon run by the missing brotherhood and the supporters of morsi who basically are rejecting the way that the security forces treated them and saying they will not be intimidated they want to continue protesting until mohamed morsy is reinstated and the constitution now i just came back from a morgue which is where the protests are starting with families who are identifying the dead they are as i said extremely determined and very angry up to losing their sons and husbands and brothers so looking really at a very very tense atmosphere here in egypt as the security forces go head to head with the muslim brotherhood and supporters and we're seeing such bloody scenes

really unprecedented in the recent history of egypt certainly they used live ammunition in such extent by the security forces in addition civilians are increasingly armed and so there have been reports of most he said quote it's particularly in the camp firing back at the police and also civilians in terms of residents attacking supporters in addition we've had this new twist as you said of sectarian violence dozens of churches have been run raided and torched including christian buildings and homes leaving many to be that this escalate this could actually escalate into its own kind of battle itself. to seeing a massively divided country civilians increasingly as well as to carry on issues on the horizon so you know at the moment people are wondering that this might actually descend into a full blown civil war that was bell truly in cairo for us and bell has been live tweeting her reports out there was some extremely graphic descriptions about what she herself has personally witnessed one of those tweets reads i can't tweet

pictures as they are too graphic brains spilling out of skulls char corpses teenagers who lost a section of their heads this really is just a testament to how volatile the situation really has become. meanwhile yemenis are recovering after a barrage of u.s. drone strikes that killed thirty eight suspected militants in the country a strike on saturday was the ninth attack in two weeks and one of those attacks may have killed one of the most dangerous terrorists in the world for him all are syria's the master bomb maker for al qaeda in the arabian peninsula and he is the man that is behind the attempted assassination of the top saudi counterterrorism official in two thousand and nine he was the person that was behind the failed christmas day underwear bomber he was also behind terror plots involving two cargo planes in two thousand and ten u.s. officials say that this man the one that you are looking at right now is the reason that you go through all of the invasive security screenings and pat downs at the

airport and they are afraid of him passing on his craft to others now if the drone attack was in fact successful this would be a catastrophic blow to al qaeda but the fact is that we just don't know if he is alive or dead or was injured at all yemen remains a focus for washington after a tip of a terrorist threat prompted the u.s. state department to close a number of embassy embassies and consulates in the middle east as well as in africa that happened earlier this month all but the embassy in sanaa yemen have opened now i was joined earlier by yemen analysts. who writes the yemeni eighteen dot com blog and kora courier from. and i started off by asking some ah if the increase in drone strikes has affected how yemenis view the us. absolutely i think in the past ten days there have been about drone strikes nine drone strikes right now and what's happening is i'm seeing yemenis hate america more and more and i'm

talking about yemenis who actually went outside to know about america have studied america at some point we just don't understand why the country has to be droned eight times in ten days i think a lot of people are scared they're speaking out of fear they don't know what to expect next from the u.s. now cora what do we know about the thirty eight yemenis killed in these strikes they're called so suspected militants by the obama administration but what do we really know about their links to terrorism. well it's important to know that they're called suspected militants generally by officials off the record sort of anonymous comments we rarely rarely ever get official acknowledgement that the u.s. was even involved in the strike that it was a u.s. drone strike as opposed to a yemeni air strike for example so you really in terms of official numbers you don't get anything from the u.s. government what we do have is pulled together from these off the record comments and by from the on the ground work of journalists and. in yemen and some other

interesting thing is that despite president obama having promises to have more transparency here in the u.s. we have really not seen very much but you have an interesting perspective because you can provide both the american perspective and the many perspective are they getting any more information coming out about these strikes i actually have to follow u.s. media when i'm reading about drone strikes when the drone strikes happened didn't cover it at all there was an award handed out to people who can catch or capture any of people it was only broadcasted on yemeni television at nine pm then it was mainly on american and english news websites and i feel like a lot of yemenis don't really know what's going on why don't they have interest in what's going on i mean if something was happening in the back of our neighborhoods we would know well they want to know they want to know but there's a lack of transparency from the government when the first drone strikes started i mean in the past ten days the any president was actually here in washington d.c.

meeting with president barack obama and so many people until now didn't have a yemeni official come and speak to them on national television calming them down or letting them know what's going on and kora as i have mentioned president obama promised some type of transparency have we seen any of that involving these most recent strikes or anything in the future in the present days of him actually following through with that promise. well the administration is now tending to speak more openly about the broad program of targeted killing a in the big speech president obama's big speech in may he laid out the sort of new guidelines indicated that there were now going to be stricter criteria for when it could be taken but just in recent days again we've sort of retreated to the tendency that most of the details that we get about what's going on in yemen are coming in sort of off the record of statements from officials the president was asked on friday about the uptick in drones and his strikes in yemen and his

response is well i can't discuss specific operational issues so that tends to be the response i've been trying to track pretty closely what happens after civilian deaths are alleged in yemen given that this is again another area in which the administration promised greater transparency and generally again they will talk generally about it they've said that there's now a standard for near certainty that no civilian will be harmed in a strike but after the fact they generally refuse to comment on any particular strike you know some all one of the reasons that they were that we believe that they were really going after yemen was because of came all some yuri which is what i mentioned. is what shows what i mentioned earlier but was there any kind of confirmation that we know of them targeting how can we really know if he is dead or alive at the moment i don't think we're going to get the i think we have to wait until the end of august because

a lot of the bodies tend to be charred when they're. so we're going to have to wait to see who the people are i know that there are thirty six casualties from these drone strikes i don't know if all of them are going to be a cure if you odds are there are a lot of casualties in there and what can you elaborate on how the people of yemen view of this man the master bomb maker i don't think they view a.q. a.p. as a big. as a big. terror threat in yemen itself because yemenis more than sixty percent of the population is living under the poverty line there's sectarian problems going on in the region the country half the country needs to cede so when it comes to a.p. they're not really operating in yemen they're not at the moment they're not the biggest threat in the eyes of the yemeni people very interesting now you're a news outlet pro publica trying to determine whether the u.s. was giving out condolence payments to families of innocent victims of drone strikes in general and also more specifically of these yemeni strikes this is the response

that you got from a freedom of information act request that you sent out it says u.s. army major general karl horse responded a thorough and good faith search was conducted in thirty three pages were located after a thorough review i have determined that the information is exempt from release in its entirety so are there any other ways of determining whether these payments are being made and are you happy with this response or are you planning to appeal it. well the dia de also told me that they just they told me straight out a spokesman told me that they are not making that the d.o.d. has not made condolence payments in yemen or i actually asked also about somalia given not not very recently but there have been u.s. direct actions in somalia so they've told me just straight out that they're not doing it there that contrast directly with what cia director john brennan said in february in front of during his confirmation process he said that the u.s. does where appropriate for strikes outside of afghanistan will will sometimes offer

condolence payments it was not a very specific statement he said it in his confirmation process we don't know whether he was referring to the cia it could have been referring to pakistan there's a little on the ground evidence that these payments are actually happening they they've now become embraced as a tool in afghanistan they've been widely used there nearly a million dollars in the last year in fiscal year two thousand and twelve were given out for. roughly three hundred payments. so and really what those what those payments also brought in afghanistan was a way in which when you would get a sense of these both the scale of civilian injury and the relationship between the civilian population and the u.s. soldiers we obviously don't have soldiers on the ground in yemen that makes for a different situation sure and as you go forward with this we are asking you to keep us informed so that we can keep our audience informed of everything that pro publica is trying to do in terms of this foyer request kora career and national

security correspondent with pro publica and also some donny she's a yemeni analyst and the creator of the web site yemeni dot com thank you so much you think well ever heard of the saying that the best defense is a good often some companies are taking that mantra to heart when it comes to digital hackers turn the channel to just about any news station these days and you are sure to hear about hacking from baby monitors to computers and even cars a new study of fifty six large american firms found that there was a total of one hundred two successful cyber attacks per week in two thousand and twelve alone that's a forty two percent rise from the year before three quarters of those hacks are a direct result of weak passwords or stolen usernames and passwords and in order to stop these hacks or at least to learn more about the people who are conducting them a number of companies are now using some of the very techniques that hackers themselves use to recover stolen data one way to do that is the honey pots are

basically the firm plans of false information in that system to trick data the honeypot server is a decoy that gathers information about intruders so essentially that means fighting fire with fire but can these companies really out hack the hackers and is it even legal well i pose that very question to the founder of s.s. people who he wants to need god and here's what he had to say. the term that comes to mind when you say hacking back is vigilante justice or an eye for an eye and at the end of the day we have historically always thought of those things as blatantly illegal and the fact of the matter is even if you're under attack a corporation hacking back is going to engage in something illegal but there's actually a bigger thing that's a bigger issue not just an ethical one or at least illegal one or a legal one and that is when you attack a hacker you are actually declaring war against that hacker and their forces on

coming back at you are much more than you will ever have because hackers can be coming in from ten different countries that they've already hacked a bunch of computers to cause these that they're waking up and as a security guy inside a corporation what you're really doing is attacking another victim that they've already victimized so you're not going to get anywhere number one and number two you're going to do something illegal and number three you can to declare war on a hacker and that's even worse than just putting up your defenses and focusing your time your money your energy on that and there are a lot of things that they can do that was going to be my question you know i mean how smart is that really to go head to head with these hackers especially when they have a community itself says at the very best people that work within this community don't work for the government or for companies because they simply don't pay enough so is it possible really to hire the best of the best and to outsmart digital thieves well hackers a and you will see this in through hacking groups like anonymous they

organize very quickly and they do truly find the best of the best to have all sorts of reasons for attacking companies so from an internal corporation perspective what you have to do is something that a lot of people don't like to hear in the boardrooms of america although that conversation is increasing more and more and that is put security first put that on the budget because it's a requirement it's something that you just have to do and and from a business person. i think consumer your consumer will trust you if they feel confident they can use your company and not worry about losing their information and then if you do that raise those salaries bring in more bring in or bring in companies like us we have can from the outside we get hired to do what's called white hat hacking and that a lot of corporations to do that engage in hacking themselves using a good guy and when you do that then at least you know where the bone ability is you can go fix it and you can do it before the hacker finds it and then do it again in a few months because things change in networks and you want to be constantly ready

you can never let your guard down so focus on security rather than opening pandora's box when it comes to hack attacks is there any examples of specific companies that are partaking in this hack attack. well if they are they oughtn't not to be talking about it because it is illegal but in terms of the the legal side of it many many companies and there's a definite upward tick in this area are hiring white out hackers to attack their networks we've seen the number of requests coming through us going up we're seeing people who do this for a living they're getting hired a lot so if you're a white hat hacker and you're capable of doing this there's a definite you know business potential out there for you and to do it is you know we're in a strange way it's actually good to do it this way because if you know your network to well it's kind of like your house you know where everything is and you miss the obvious one or you miss the one that's behind the other window that you didn't know about but when we come in we think like bad guys and when we think like bad guys

but we're truly good guys we actually will find things that you may not find and that's why it's actually a good thing to do and finally he will you kind of touched on the consumer side of this a little bit earlier but this is ultimately a battle between hackers and these companies so how do consumers fit into this and how can they protect themselves if they are customers of this continent ok let's think the headline major corporations caused customer data has been stolen by hackers if i'm one of those customers the first thing i'm going to think is wait a minute we give you all this money you make all this money what happened why is my customer info gone and do i trust you anymore so from a consumer relationship building from an affinity perspective long term relationship with your customer customer retention all those things you learn in the business school is america if you're not focused on protecting that network you will have an impact on your bottom line on your revenue growth and that from a corporation perspective is not only just the right thing to do to protect your

customer but it's the right business thing to do and i think wall street would like that you're bored too or like your investors would like that so there's all sorts of reasons to put security first he mancini kalam founder of the s.s. people who thank you so much for joining us. thank you. now when it comes to wall street and big banks so much do we really know about the people working in america's financial institutions well a recent article by the c.f.a. institute charade economy claims that one in ten people in the financial industry are get this certifiable psychopath but i'm not talking about chainsaw slinging serial killers that moviegoers have come to know over the years but the psychological condition that includes superficial charm conning and manipulative behavior lack of empathy and remorse and get this a willingness to take risks sound familiar well political commentator sam sachs investigates if psychopaths are naturally attracted to wall street or if the

business creates them. i know my pager can be correct i think sometimes. yes this is just a movie about a psychopath a banker but really we all know there's something a little off about wall street given recent behavior even the financial times wonders surely only someone with a serious personality disorder could have thought it was a good idea to sell a highly risky financial instrument like a c.d.o. squared to a naive investor who clearly did not understand the risks or would react with anger when told that they would not be paid multimillion pound bonuses because their previous bets had gone so badly wrong that their employer had to be bailed out by the taxpayer and we also have the patrick bateman ask headlines you hear about the banker who is screaming racial slurs and strangers and got knocked out on the street remove the bankers have cocaine fueled meltdowns were on the banker who

stabbed economy so what's behind this dr alexander michelle studied a group of bankers for more than a decade what she described was a factory on wall street that grinds people up and tosses them out during what i've found is that often approximately four years the picture changes performance declines not on technical skills the bankers are still superb as far as technical knowledge but chris have a two declines judgment declines ethical sensitivity could declines at about four because not surprisingly the body breaks down it's believed one percent of the general population is psychopathic so can we say wall street actually has a higher percentage dr michelle wasn't willing to go that far i would say for now there is no evidence to support that kind of claim fair enough but i also had to talk to some former wall street insiders people you may refer to as recovering psychopaths alexis goldstein spent seven years. on wall street she describes the

culture it's a complete lack of empathy and it's really all about being instead of an island as you can be and having enough money and enough power so that you can basically behave however you want and treat people have or you want the proper term for it is f. you money richard usko worked at a i g there were times in my own work life where i had had to stay awake for seventy two hours to get a project then so a colleague or two two or three of us would get together and we'd stay up for three nights and we'd be drinking and we'd be using substances to keep going so we got pretty crazy but we did it because we were being encouraged to do it by the situation so were we psychopaths i don't think so i think we were people under enormous pressure we're not through yet it always seemed that wall street was the place where the psychopathic among us could not only take refuge but flourish but it appears more complicated than that so i think it all speaks to breeding

a group of people that are very predatory in the way they pursue money and yes psychopathic is one where they could be used and i think the more that that happens the more that that culture starts to attract people who have those personality carrick's characteristics to begin with so i think it's all of the above its nature it's nurture whatever the reason for the perceived psychopathy emanating from our nation's financial district this should concern us all it's the fire economy finance insurance and real estate that is making up a larger and larger portion of our total economy and understanding who's running this industry might explain why wall street has been preying on the rest of our economy from homeowners to oil consumers to most recently aluminum purchasers for the men what can we do about it sure we can pass more regulations we can pass legislation like glass steagall to try and limit the damage that wall street bankers can do but really how do you legislate away psychopaths we have to stop

lionizing people. like for example dreamy diamond the c.e.o. of j.p. morgan chase i think we have to make it culturally shameful to exhibit psychopathic behavior we're not going to be able legislator way around this but we can have a culture shift and i think the one thing that wall street is vulnerable is to is shame wall street is vulnerable to shame occupy prove that so in a way the occupy movement was just trying to hold an intervention for the bankers unfortunately wall street and its friends weren't ready to listen and they likely won't be ready to listen anytime soon as long as all that a few money keeps flowing in in washington observing wall street from a very safe distance same sex party. every day we are constantly surrounded by the fruits of past scientific research from vaccines to the smartphone in your pocket but there are also forms of research that can seem odd and possibly even a waste of time and money for hypothesis the residents laurie her finest.

german rocket scientist werner von braun one said research is what i'm doing when i don't know what i'm doing scientific research is great like that it can lead society down new paths of understanding and facilitate growth in all aspects of our lives it is absolutely is potential to the progress of humanity however a lot of research produces headlines that seem so stupid or obvious poor irresponsibly speculative that it makes you wonder why bees that is worth even conducted here are just

a few example study headlines from this week alone. study babies the puppies elicit most every. posting too many facebook selfies can hurt to real world relationships studies. shopping is a loop of loneliness study finds a way you study plants alone can stop climate change eighty eighty texting dangerous driving gumba nation study a man's occupation linked to time spent on house work study finding study says the rich drive differently always posting pics on facebook then your weird studies that. study despite the new hookup culture college students aren't having more sex than they used to study white space or meritocracy when very tapestry favors whites . study miami dolphins have n.f.l.'s fourth please to engaged.

a messy desk makes you more creative studies says. these are just from this week i could go on and i think you get the point do we really need to look to us daddy to figure out if will get divorced is a study that finds that rich people drive differently really beneficial to society the truth is that most of these studies do less for the progress of humanity and more for the pockets of some big corporations. scientific studies are largely beneficial to society but when it comes to studying our own behavior we might also want to just consider promoting common sense and using our own individual judgment as well as one of my favorite writers frank herbert one fed highly organized research is guaranteed to produce nothing new for instead of studying the effects

of social circumstances on our brains you should just start using them for one tonight let's talk about theft by following me on twitter at the rest of. the right that doesn't for now for more on the stories we cover go to youtube dot com slash r t america. have a great night. he was the libertarian party presidential candidate that ran against president obama and mitt romney former governor gary johnson has some harsh words for both the president and the republican party. also actor and political activist james duke mason who's calling for a united states boycott of the winter olympics in russia it's all next on politicking with larry king.